Breakfast Sandwiches

I woke up this morning at 7;45am, knowing that the little lady from "Blue Green Bar", a cafe across the street, would be rapping on my door at 8:00am sharp to deliver breakfast. Sure enough, just as I sat down in the main room of my apartment and turned on the news, there it was: "knock knock knock".

Excited by the prospect of food, I went to the door and let in my breakfast delivering friend. We greated one another, and then she walked through the door. Upon entering my room, she instantly turned to me and handed me a card for a free cocktail at her bar before setting my breakfast down on the table and then leaving.

Just like the day before, breakfast consisted of two cups in a bag, a sandwich, and four or five cherry tomatoes. The sandwich, however, was a variation on the sandwich from the day before in that it was no longer on a roll, but on three pieces of white bread. The fillings, the mystery meats, cucumbers, tomatoes, cheese, and sweet sauce, all remained the same. The cherry tomatoes were equally juicy as the day before, and I accidently shot the juice from one at my computer as I bit down on it- the sign of a good tomatoe.

Yeah, there really is nothing like a good mystery-meat sandwich for breakfast.

Last night at 10:00pm, just as I was about to try and get to bed to continue adjusting to the time over here, I got a call from Karin (don't know if I wrote about her yet- more or less my boss) asking me if I wanted to meet up with some of the OMEGA team in Sanlitunr (an expatriot filled, tourist attracting bar street in the Chaoyang district) to get something to eat. Honestly speaking, I was dead tired, but I went anyway because I like those guys and wanted to get to know them better.

I spent a lot of time in Sanlitunr during the summer of 2007 when I was first in Beijing. Unfortunately a good portion of the memories of that time period are blurry and dark, marred by the effects of the alcohol my fellow students and I used to ward off the stresses of intensive language study during the day.

Anyway, returning to Sanlitunr was an interesting experience, for it has definitely changed a bit.
An Apple (computers) store, for example, has mysteriously sprung up in the area's busiest section, which seems strange because the area mostly consists of bars, and it appears to be a little cleaner in general.

I met up with my colleagues at an expatriot-filled restaurant-bar called "Tree", which apparently serves up a pretty mean pizza. Walking into the restaurant....I felt like I had left Beijing for a moment due to the onslaught of drinking and laughing "laowai" (foreigner) faces. The waitresses and servers, of course, were Chinese, but very little Chinese was actually spoken in the restaurant itself.

Grabbing a bottle of Tsingtao, I sat down at the table with my new friends and tried to join in the conversation. Unfortunately for me, the Swiss speak in French the majority of the time, especially when they are drinking, eating, and relaxing. Although I can follow along with what they say, my French is too undeveloped to actually add any sort of intelligent conversation to the mix. Therefore I spend a lot of time sitting, listening, and drinking, which suits me just fine. I must say though that Charles, who is head of security at the OMEGA residence, makes a strong effort to speak in English around me when he can. He's a cool dude.

I hung out with the crew for an hour, or hour and a half, then bid them goodnight as I walked away from the restaurant toward the main street to flag down a cab. As I rounded the first corner past the restaurant, I nearly ran straight into a young, drunk, white laowai leaning against the side of a building puking his guts out into the street. He stop his hurling for a brief moment to look up at me with empty, distant eyes, and the dropped his head back down and continued on with his liquid show.

Beautiful....I guess Sanlitunr has not changed that much afterall.